Ginger, Oranges & Me

Spent my morning multi-tasking myself to distraction. I do my laundry every Saturday morning, but I seem to have so much more of it now that I'm stinking up all my gym clothes. (I don't know why I felt the need to share that thought!)

What I came to post about has nothing to do with laundry. I wanted to share my recipes for a couple of little concoctions I came up with. (And lemme stop lying; I didn't come up with a dang thing. What I did was add my own twist to something I saw online.)

This is a recipe for candied oranges.

I'm not as into candied oranges as I thought.

This is a recipe for candied ginger.

What I meant to search for was crystallized ginger, which seems to be candied ginger with a coating of sugar. ~shrug~

Okay. In the madness of all my screw-ups in finding recipes for candied and crystallized oranges and ginger, I went all ADHD in the kitchen and decided it would be nice to have some kind of sweet, sticky stuff to add to my sparkling waters and teas.

Since I already had made quite a mess of the counters, I went ahead, put on some music, and did my own thing.

This is what I came up with for orange-flavored syrup:

Ingredients

• Orange peels (can include mandarin, navel, etc.) 

• Sugar (I use raw sugar or honey and raw, but white table sugar is fine)

• vanilla (opt. If you can get hold of the bean, perfect!)

• vinegar (opt)

• water 

Instructions

• Preferable, but not necessary, to soak the peels for a several hours or overnight in cold water and vinegar to soften and leech any chemicals out.

• Use a knife to cut away all the white from the inside of peels. Cut the peels into strips

• Boil peels in plain water, draining and boiling at least 3 times. This is supposed to get rid of any bitterness.

• When finished with initial boilings, add equal amounts water and sugar (make sure water covers peels), and let simmer. For thicker syrup, more sugar and longer simmering time.

• You are going to keep the peels and syrup together.

I also like to add some vanilla extract (or natural vanilla bean) to the cooling syrup. Store in a tightly-lidded glass container in fridge.

This is my recipe for ginger-flavored syrup:

Ingredients

• Ginger (fresh, peeled)

• Sugar (I use raw sugar or honey and raw, but white table sugar is fine)

• Water

Instructions

• Slice the ginger in slivers

• Cover with water in pan and add equal amount of sugar

• Simmer until syrup begins to form

• After about an hour & a half, even with a thin syrup, the ginger will have flavored the water enough

• Keep ginger and syrup together & store in tight-lidded container in fridge

I like to add the ginger syrup to my drinking water after my workouts. My older brother just likes the syrup in any type of fizzy water.

Adding a couple drops of either syrup to sparkling water or tea (whether hot or cold), makes me feel like I've done something my mother and grandmother would be proud of. Besides, I know for a fact that ginger is good for upset tummies. Oranges are, well, just tasty.

Peace
--Free

P.S.:

**RECIPE** Hot Water Corn Bread & Seasoned Pinto Beans

A favorite pairing of mine. Everyone does things differently. This is the way my mother and sister taught me to prepare these dishes. (I've posted the cornbread recipe before, but revised it as I've prepared it so many more times over the years!)

Hot Water Cornbread
1 cup yellow Cornmeal (I use Albers)
1/4 cup Onions finely diced
1 small Garlic clove (opt) fine-chopped
Green Onion (opt) fine-chopped
about 1/4 tsp Salt
about 1/2 white sugar
Canola for frying (enough to have 1/4'' deep in fry pan)
1/2 tsp Olive oil - to add to mix (opt.)
4 cups Water
(Paper towels for draining.)

Measurements depend on how much bread you want. A cup of cornmeal makes about eight small playing card-sized patties. You can choose shape & size of patties and it's not difficult to make more, so don't worry. Have everything chopped and added to meal before preparing water and oil.

• Put your water on to boil.
• Put your oil on, ready to heat for frying.
• Mix all your other ingredients in a heat-resistant bowl.
• When water is boiling (this is the most important thing!), slowly add to Cornmeal mix, a little bit at a time, mixing well to get all the meal wet. Stir in and add more water, slowly until your consistency is wet but thick enough to scoop and pour into hot grease - about the same but a touch thicker as for baking cornbread. Now add the olive oil to mix and stir well.
• Fry until first side is crispy, flip and repeat. (I like my bread a little mushy in the middle, so I fry light.)

Keep in mind that you can always add more water, but you can't take it away. (If you try adding more cornmeal, do it separately with more BOILING water.)

The trick to this is that the boiling water cooks the meal even before you fry it. If your water is not boiling, your patties will be "mealy" and good for nothing.

Make sure to drain your bread well. It is meant to be eaten hot, but some people like it cold. Also, you can let it cool and serve with the beans to heat the bread.

Seasoned Pinto Beans
Cook your beans as bag instructs, except do not soak. Soaking tends to make the beans "hully," with the outer skin falling off. Instead, add about a 1/4 tsp of baking soda for every 3 cups of beans.

Smoked Hock (or smoked turkey)
Yellow onions (diced medium to fine, your pref.)
Garlic cloves (slit as if you are going to dice, but left whole)
*Brown Sugar (this thickens & flavors bean juice)
Salt
Pepper
Onion powder
Garlic salt
Liquid Smoke (about 1/8 Tsp to 3 cups)
Olive oil (1 Tbl to every 3 cups beans)
(A pot of hot water on hand to add to beans if they start "drying" before done)

• Add the hock (or turkey wing/piece) when you put on the beans and water. I start my beans in cold water. 
• When your beans first reach a good simmer, add the baking soda, then all of the other ingredients just a bit at a time. You will go back and taste several times as the beans begin to form a juice. Add more seasonings to taste. Trick here is to cook slow and low, adjusting the cover as needed. 
• When/if you need to add water, add only very hot or boiling water to match temp of the beans.
• *The brown sugar is added to thicken bean juice. Begin adding (about a Tbl to 3 cup beans), little at a time if you notice beans are halfway to done but juice is not thickening. The flavor is nicer IMO than white sugar.

*********************************

Both these recipes are passed down to me from my mother, who got them from her mother and so on. I have made changes to the beans - no "fried meat grease" and I go easier on the salt.

If you are sharing this food with someone (like me) who needs even less salt, you can leave the beans less salty and add a bit more to part of your hot-water cornbread - if they are being served together.

Peace
--Free

P.S.: My thinking has been a little iffy lately, so let me know if I need to clarify any part of the recipe.

Ethnicity & Food

Okay, I'm going to piss off a lot of people, but I will go ahead & say it:

Black people (in general & especially) need to eat healthier.

~waiting for hail of stones to stop raining down~

Now that I've gone and put it out there, let me explain what I mean.

Not all black folk eat unhealthily. I know a lot of black (brown, taupe, tan, deep chocolate,etc) people who do watch what they eat and understand why they need to. That said, I also know a LOT of "us" who still use the excuse of "Grandma did" to eat things that are so bad for anyone: lots of pork and "drippings," red meat, salt, salt and salt. I am not joking when I say that I knew an older woman some years back who actually ate salt sandwiches. Did you hear what I said? SALT sandwiches. She would cut up a raw onion, some tomatoes and literally coat this in salt and make a sandwich. Seriously. (She is dead now. Died at around 58 years old.)

My mother was an "old school" foodie - she ate a lot of green stuff, cooked and raw - but she had that salt habit. Salt and pepper were her seasoning staples. She also ate tomato and onion sandwiches. She didn't coat them with salt, but she did use salt.

When babies were born into our family, some of them teethed on pork gristle. Yeah. Kind of gross, but at least there was no salt involved. Yet. (I have one niece who has been a chicken-or-fish-only gal for about 15 years & if I really want to make her ill, I remind her that her teething was done on a pig ear! LOL)

The biggest excuses for a lot of poor eating habits, no matter what your ethnicity is, is: "Mama did it," "It's a black/German/Puerto Rican/Polish/etc thing." Like La Nostra Cosa (hope I didn't mangle that). Yeah, and sometime "Our Thing" will kill your ass. As deadly as it it cool-sounding.

Our family "thing" with food has always been a lot of variety as long as it's battered, buttered, fried or salted. Or all of the above, damnit. I got better about my eating habits as I got older (mostly out of shame), but until I was around 20 and got married, I ate a lot of delicious and bad-for-you food. My first husband was from a country where the food is bland but the people live for-freaking-ever! I'm from Texas. Take a look at what I can tell you about:

Homemade cakes (Pound, Chocolate, Pudding)
Fatback (deep-fried and eaten just like that, drippings poured into vegetables as a seasoning)
Grits, rice and hot cereals (with butter - lots of butter)
Hominy (which is the only "grits" we ate without butter)
Eggs, eggs and eggs (scrambled, sunny-side, runny or hard-cooked - as long as they were salted and sometimes, believe this or not, buttered)
Pork (chops - breaded or not - bacon, skin fried or pickled and funky - aka CHITLINS)
Breads (rolls of all kinds, corn-batter, hoecake, corncake, fried, grilled and sun-cooked)
Greens (always with drippings, salt and a hunk of that damned fatback)

Do you see what I mean about good food & bad habits? It's a joke among black people that we will waste no part of a pig. "From the rooter to the tooter." I mean, seriously, we eat the feet, tails, ears, ass and freaking guts. Ya know. That's not a diet, that's damn near an addiction. I remember the stench that hovered over the kitchen whenever the family sat around cleaning "chitterlings" (my British ex-husband actually called them by the proper name & I damn near laughed my ass into a fit every time he said it. He kind of liked that nasty shit. Ugh!) If the smell of "chitlins" didn't put you off any food until the smell of rotted ass died down, I don't think you can be cured of Pork. You almost couldn't fix chitlins without have the neighborhood knowing. I think the only reason folks eat that mess with so much hot sauce is to give their senses something else to concentrate on while they eat it. I'm sorry, but, damn.

Some food that I heard my parents talk about might not have been bad for the health, but it still just didn't seem right for humans to eat. Let's visualize what "Rocky Mountain Oysters" are, shall we? They are bull's balls. I promise. Apparently, my Grandma Jack just loved her some R.M.O. (What's really nasty is that I hear they have a gelatinous texture. Ewwww!)

But back to my original point. We (meaning anyone who grew up eating unhealthy foods) have got to do better, people.

One of the reasons given for a bad diet (other than the old "Good enough for Mama" excuse) is that "Mama" and her mama & daddy  ate the way they did because of poverty. Okay, a lot of people (especially in this economy) are still feeling impoverished. (And trust me when I say that I can teach you some creative ways to spell "broke.") That's still no excuse not to do what we can. Guess what's free? NOT adding so much salt. NOT adding so much (or any) "drippings." Not cooking everything in a batter or butter or fatty oil.

Guess what else? Not being a diabetic, amputee, kidney patient is cheaper than anything. We can make all the jokes we want about people having "Sugar" (diabetes) and "Salt" (high blood pressure), but that shit isn't even a little funny when it hits home or heart. I know firsthand.

With that little mammy-made rant of mine over, I will say this: I've recently learned that it is possible to do better. And it's not as hard or expensive as we'd like to think and in some ways is cheaper (go price a pound of butter if you don't believe that). It's not easy though. Breaking life-long ways and habits is never easy. Just trying is better than nothing at all.

I recently learned that I can eat my vegetables without curing them in salt. I am having a hard time getting used to eating so many vegetables, but my goal is to eat vegetables as much as I used to eat meat. I'm not giving up on meat (I'd be out of mind to swear off Lucky Wishbone forever!), but I'm not making it a part of every meal as if I can't live without it. I can and of I get any sicker or broker, I will have to.

For Memorial Day, I had a two burgers. One beef patty during the barbecue we had and one Portabello mushroom later when I went back for more. It wasn't bad at all. I consoled myself with the fact that I could have just a thin beef patty but a fat-ass mushroom burger! I think it's partly in the seasonings and partly in the mindset.

As I try new vegetable dishes, I tell myself what my former mother-in-law told me was an old English joke for the newly married virgins: "Just close you eyes and think of England." That never fails to crack me the hell up! I just close my eyes and think of life not on dialysis or in and out of a hospital.

Good eating, everyone. After a couple rough days, I'm having a lucid one so I'm off to work on the book.

Peace
--Free

Recipes (yes, I DO cook!)

Here are a couple of my recipes for those of working with a thin budget...

Dish-o-chicken

Since I've married, I've had to learn to improvise in the kitchen. A LOT! This is a pretty quick and easy chicken dish I came up with:

Ingredients

• chicken pieces (I use whatever's on sale) and I used six legs
  
• about 1/2 cup sour cream
• about 2 cups bbq sauce (I used tangy honey flavored)
• fave seasonings (I used garlic pwdr, italian, and crushed chicken boullion cubes)

Thaw and rinse chicken. While it's still wet, shake on the seasonings & let sit in a bowl, covered in fridge (for at least 1/2 hour, but try for a couple of hours).

Directions

• When ready, heat oven to around 350
• mix sour cream and bbq sauce
  
• pour 1/2 of sauce mix into bottom of baking pan/casserole dish
• layer chicken pieces in bottom
  
• pour rest of sauce mix over chicken, making sure each piece is coated/covered/slathered
• bake for about 30 minutes, then...
• check and turn the chicken in pan, keeping covered with sauce...
• continue baking, checking every 20 minutes or so (to keep chicken coated with the sauce) until done.

I serve my chicken dish with baked potatoes and steamed broccoli and instead of using butter on the taters, I used some of the chicken sauce (since I usually smother my broccoli with butter!) Once you try this, you can alter the sour cream/bbq sauce mix to be more or less tangy/creamy. And, yes, I came up with this one all. on. my own. Shoot, I'm thinking about writing a cookbook called the WalMart chef (for all of us po' folks!)

 

Easy One-Dish Meal

Hi guys. I know I promised something else, but I wanted to share this quickie recipe with you. I call it One Dish:

Ingredients

Hamburger Meat (browned with the seasonings) - or, if you like, chicken or tofu Potatoes (baked) Potatoes (boiled & smashed) Tomato Sauce Tomato Paste Garlic (chopped as fine as you like) Garlic (chopped in large pieces) Onions (chopped) Lawry's seasoning salt Black pepper (other fresh peppers if you want) Italian Seasoning Now - here's the cool part: I don't have any set amounts of ingredients to give you; use what you see fit for your family size. Personally, I use a pound of meat, 4 large potatoes to bake and 2 large potatoes to boil/smash, and then I season to taste. We have 5 adults and 2 kids in our crowd & at least 2 or three drop-ins at meal times! I have had leftovers enough for a couple of small lunch servings after all that. You'll need boiling bots, deep baking dish (or a couple of shallow ones), deep skillet.

Directions

Put the potatoes on to bake since they can take a while to be well baked Peel and chop other potatoes in chunks to be boiled later (When baked potatoes are half done, slit and insert pieces of garlic and finish baking) Start browning the meat & when mostly done, drain the oil (leaving a little in the meat to hold the seasonings) Add the dry seasonings to taste Add the Tomato Paste and Tomato Sauce (save the paste can) Using the Paste can, add water to dilute the meat sauce (it will cook down during the simmering) Simmer covered for at least 10 minutes on a medium heat (add more water if the meat sauce thickens too much) Start boiling your chunked potatoes Add onions and remaining garlic Reduce heat to low, cover & simmer for at least 20 minutes When boiled potatoes are done, mash them as smooth as you can, adding a touch of milk if you need to (can add a little butter, but try for plain mashed to keep down the calories). Set aside. When baked potatoes are done, peel off skin (or not; I sometimes leave the skin on) & line up in bottom of baking dish. With a knife sort of chop/chunk up the baked potatoes so they are spread around the bottom of the dish. Season the lining potatoes with some of your dry seasonings Ladle the meat sauce over the baked potato lining Spread the boiled/mashed potatoes over the top of the sauce Sprinkle top potatoes with seasonings if you want (I use the Lawry's for this) Put the dish in the oven on a VERY low broil just long enough to brown (you don't have to do this, but I like the brown-topped texture. You can serve by scooping portions out with a large spoon. NOTE: My niece likes to top her finished dish with cheese, but she is young enough where a couple of days at the gym works for her food sins! Enjoy!